I tend to disagree. To me a good ORM totally (ok, not totally, but as totally as possible) abstracts the database away from your code. That's it's purpose. You

I tend to disagree. To me a good ORM totally (ok, not totally, but as totally as possible) abstracts the database away from your code. That's it's purpose. You just want to work with data. You want to fetch data, persist data and delete data - you don't really want to care about how that's done. That's where a good ORM can really help you out. However, if the ORM gets in your way, either because of API complexity, performance issues or other reasons, and you start to "battle" it as you said, you immediately move out of that context and start thinking in a more data oriented context. That's where SQL comes in. As I said before, I think it's a question of using the appropriate tool. I've written hundreds of applications using multiple different ORMs and just plain SQL—and I'll tell you I'll pick a good ORM over raw SQL for basic CRUD operations every time. However, I'll give you that I'll pick plain SQL over a bad ORM any day.